Nabokov Centenary Festival casts the literary giant's net far and wide

William F. Buckley Jr., left, and Dmitri Nabokov acknowledge the audience after their performance of "Dear Bunny/Dear Volodya" Thursday. Robert Barker/University Photography

By James Stevens

With a flurry of film screenings, dramatic readings, exhibitions and conference sessions, Cornell held a double celebration Sept. 9-12 for the internationally renowned novelist and former Cornell professor Vladimir Nabokov. The Nabokov Centenary Festival observed both the golden jubilee of Nabokov's joining the Department of Russian Literature faculty and the inauguration of Nabokov centenary activities around the world for 1999. Such a rich weekend of activities was only appropriate for the writer and lecturer who not only composed over 17 novels and dozens of short stories, but was a playwright, translator, chess master and expert lepidopterist -- that is, a butterfly collector and researcher.

During all of the weekend's activities, butterfly pins, earrings, ties and patches swarmed among the crowds, consisting mostly of visiting academics as well as members of the Ithaca community and Cornell students, some of whom could occasionally be heard reciting lyrics from The Police's 1980 pop hit "Don't Stand So Close to Me": It's no use, he sees her; he starts to shake, he starts to cough. Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov.

That famous book, Lolita, led to Nabokov's celebrity, financial independence and subsequent departure from Cornell. Appropriately, the centenary festival opened Wednesday night with one of the first U.S. screenings of the book's 1996 film adaptation, with background and commentary provided by the author's son, Dmitri Nabokov, and the film's screenwriter, Stephen Schiff. Far more explicit in its treatment of pedophilia and murder than Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation, Adrian Lynne's Lolita has met nearly as much controversy as the novel during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"I sometimes think of these two films as cultural bookends," Schiff told the sellout audience after the screening. "The first Lolita marked a moment where the liberation of the culture began; the near-banning of our Lolita marks a moment where we see how the culture is shrinking back from its earlier risks and pursuits."

Dmitri Nabokov informed the audience that his "little sister Lo" came to life in Ithaca as a series of note cards later developed into the celebrated novel which, he added, "ranked in the German press behind jazz, the Beatles, and Playboy as one of the 'evils of our permissive society'."

As many Nabokovians, such as biographer Brian Boyd, have observed, the expatriate author's 11 years in Ithaca (1948-1959) comprised one of the most stable and productive periods in a literary career marked by frequent relocations around the world. According to University of Washington professor Galya Diment, "Nabokov's Cornell years produced many of his most memorable and mature works," including Lolita, the autobiography Conclusive Evidence (later revised and republished as Speak, Memory) and Pnin, which was nominated for the National Book Award and featured the fictional "Wendell University."

"Some wonder, however, whether Nabokov enjoyed teaching at all, but did it primarily because he needed a steady paycheck," Diment said. "Something similar to the host-houseguest relationship between [James Joyce's characters in the novel Ulysses] Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus happened between Cornell and Nabokov: for the guest, Cornell offered the relative security of a domicile and a study where Nabokov could write some of his best work; for the host, Nabokov could offer some of his talent and intelligence as well as the possible satisfaction of watching one of Cornell's own become a gloriously famous author."

On the afternoon of Sept. 10, the College of Arts and Sciences commemorated its satisfaction with Nabokov's success and his tenure at Cornell with a plaque installed outside of room 278 in Goldwin Smith Hall, near the spot where Nabokov's office once stood prior to the building's renovation.

That evening, Nabokov's personality and literary career were remembered in a performance of Terry Quinn's "Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya" -- a dramatization of selected letters between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. With William F. Buckley Jr. in the role of Wilson and Dmitri Nabokov reading his father's letters, the remarkable friendship and bitter falling out between these literary giants from opposite ends of the political, aesthetic and personal spectra nearly came alive.

Nabokov's labyrinthine plots and literary puzzles were better remembered in the festival's three-day centenary conference, the inaugural conference of its kind and only the second to be held at Cornell since the university's 1983 Nabokov Festival, which was hailed by this year's festival organizer and chair of Cornell's Department of Russian Literature, Gavriel Shapiro, as "the benchmark of all Nabokov celebrations to come."

A vocal music concert, including Dmitri Nabokov singing bass, and a Saturday-evening private banquet for conference participants helped bring the festival to a close, though an exhibit of Nabokoviana, including international editions of Lolita and Nabokov's butterfly net, will be on display at the Carl A. Kroch Library's Nabokov Centenary Exhibition through Sept. 30.